The Applicability of Personnel Management Models to International Chinese Language Education

Wang Chaoqun

doi:10.70088/wqbq2h66

Authors

Wang Chaoqun Farabi International Business School, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70088/wqbq2h66

Keywords:

international chinese language education, personnel management, strategic human resource management, competency framework, cross-cultural management

Abstract

International Chinese language education (ICLE) now employs a workforce of tens of thousands across roughly 150 countries, yet the way that workforce is managed has drawn very little attention from either human resource scholars or ICLE researchers. This paper asks a practical question: how well do three mainstream personnel management traditions—strategic human resource management (SHRM), the competency-based approach, and cross-cultural HRM—travel to a setting built on short deployments, dual authority structures, and a workforce that mixes volunteers, government-sponsored staff, and locally recruited teachers? Drawing on empirical evidence published between 2018 and 2025, this review argues that none of the three transfers cleanly on its own, but that each contributes something the others leave out. SHRM disciplines the link between programme strategy and day-to-day HR decisions; a competency scaffold anchored in the 2022 International Society for Chinese Language Teaching standards gives recruitment and appraisal a shared vocabulary; cross-cultural HRM supplies the missing infrastructure for expatriate adjustment, dual-authority coordination, and re-entry. A contextualized framework is sketched from these three components, together with the practical implications for programme administrators. The analysis relies on secondary sources and concentrates on the tertiary and Confucius Institute segments of the field; K–12 and private-sector ICLE settings need their own study. This review contributes to the growing literature on ICLE governance by offering an integrative, evidence-informed model that bridges personnel management theory and the operational realities of international language education programmes.

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